Dear Debian community, this is bits from DPL for February. Ftpmaster team is seeking for new team members In December, Scott Kitterman announced his retirement from the project. I personally regret this, as I vividly remember his invaluable support during the Debian Med sprint at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He even took time off to ensure new packages cleared the queue in under 24 hours. I want to take this opportunity to personally thank Scott for his contributions during that sprint and for all his work in Debian. With one fewer FTP assistant, I am concerned about the increased workload on the remaining team. I encourage anyone in the Debian community who is interested to consider reaching out to the FTP masters about joining their team. If you're wondering about the role of the FTP masters, I'd like to share a fellow developer's perspective:

"My read on the FTP masters is:

• In truth, they are the heart of the project.
• They know it.
• They do a fantastic job."

I fully agree and see it as part of my role as DPL to ensure this remains true for Debian's future. If you're looking for a way to support Debian in a critical role where many developers will deeply appreciate your work, consider reaching out to the team. It's a great opportunity for any Debian Developer to contribute to a key part of the project. Project Status: Six Months of Bug of the Day In my Bits from the DPL talk at DebConf24, I announced the Tiny Tasks effort, which I intended to start with a Bug of the Day project. Another idea was an Autopkgtest of the Day, but this has been postponed due to limited time resources-I cannot run both projects in parallel. The original goal was to provide small, time-bound examples for newcomers. To put it bluntly: in terms of attracting new contributors, it has been a failure so far. My offer to explain individual bug-fixing commits in detail, if needed, received no response, and despite my efforts to encourage questions, none were asked. However, the project has several positive aspects: experienced developers actively exchange ideas, collaborate on fixing bugs, assess whether packages are worth fixing or should be removed, and work together to find technical solutions for non-trivial problems. So far, the project has been engaging and rewarding every day, bringing new discoveries and challenges-not just technical, but also social. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases, I receive positive responses and appreciation from maintainers. Even in the few instances where help was declined, it was encouraging to see that in two cases, maintainers used the ping as motivation to work on their packages themselves. This reflects the dedication and high standards of maintainers, whose work is essential to the project's success. I once used the metaphor that this project is like wandering through a dark basement with a lone flashlight-exploring aimlessly and discovering a wide variety of things that have accumulated over the years. Among them are true marvels with popcon >10,000, ingenious tools, and delightful games that I only recently learned about. There are also some packages whose time may have come to an end-but each of them reflects the dedication and effort of those who maintained them, and that deserves the utmost respect. Leaving aside the challenge of attracting newcomers, what have we achieved since August 1st last year?

• Fixed more than one package per day, typically addressing multiple bugs.
• Added and corrected numerous Homepage fields and watch files.
• The most frequently patched issue was "Fails To Cross-Build From Source" (all including patches).
• Migrated several packages from cdbs/debhelper to dh.
• Rewrote many d/copyright files to DEP5 format and thoroughly reviewed them.
• Integrated all affected packages into Salsa and enabled Salsa CI.
• Approximately half of the packages were moved to appropriate teams, while the rest are maintained within the Debian or Salvage teams.
• Regularly performed team uploads, ITS, NMUs, or QA uploads.
• Filed several RoQA bugs to propose package removals where appropriate.
• Reported multiple maintainers to the MIA team when necessary.

With some goodwill, you can see a slight impact on the trends.debian.net graphs (thank you Lucas for the graphs), but I would never claim that this project alone is responsible for the progress. What I have also observed is the steady stream of daily uploads to the delayed queue, demonstrating the continuous efforts of many contributors. This ongoing work often remains unseen by most-including myself, if not for my regular check-ins on this list. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to everyone pushing fixes there, contributing to the overall quality and progress of Debian's QA efforts. If you examine the graphs for "Version Control System" and "VCS Hosting" with the goodwill mentioned above, you might notice a positive trend since mid-last year. The "Package Smells" category has also seen reductions in several areas: "no git", "no DEP5 copyright", "compat <9", and "not salsa". I'd also like to acknowledge the NMUers who have been working hard to address the "format != 3.0" issue. Thanks to all their efforts, this specific issue never surfaced in the Bug of the Day effort, but their contributions deserve recognition here. The experience I gathered in this project taught me a lot and inspired me to some followup we should discuss at a Sprint at DebCamp this year. Finally, if any newcomer finds this information interesting, I'd be happy to slow down and patiently explain individual steps as needed. All it takes is asking questions on the Matrix channel to turn this into a "teaching by example" session. By the way, for newcomers who are interested, I used quite a few abbreviations-all of which are explained in the Debian Glossary. Sneak Peek at Upcoming Conferences I will join two conferences in March-feel free to talk to me if you spot me there.

1. FOSSASIA Summit 2025 (March 13-15, Bangkok, Thailand) Schedule: https://eventyay.com/e/4c0e0c27/schedule
2. Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (March 22-23, Chemnitz, Germany) Schedule: https://chemnitzer.linux-tage.de/2025/de/programm/vortraege

Both events will have a Debian booth-come say hi! Kind regards Andreas.

by por Andrew Gon alves Debian Day in Santa Maria - RS 2024 was held after a 5-year hiatus from the previous version of the event. It took place on the morning of August 16, in the Blue Hall of the Franciscan University (UFN) with support from the Debian community and the Computing Practices Laboratory of UFN. The event was attended by students from all semesters of the Computer Science, Digital Games and Informational Systems, where we had the opportunity to talk to the participants. Around 60 students attended a lecture introducing them to Free and Open Source Software, Linux and were introduced to the Debian project, both about the philosophy of the project and how it works in practice and the opportunities that have opened up for participants by being part of Debian. After the talk, a packaging demonstration was given by local DD Francisco Vilmar, who demonstrated in practice how software packaging works in Debian. I would like to thank all the people who helped us:

• Debian Project
• Professor Ana Paula Canal (UFN)
• Professor Sylvio Andr Garcia (UFN)
• Laboratory of Computing Practices
• Francisco Vilmar (local DD)

And thanks to all the participants who attended this event asking intriguing questions and taking an interest in the world of Free Software. Photos:

by Thiago Pezzo and Giovani Ferreira Local celebrations of Debian 2024 Day also happened on [Pouso Alegre, MG, Brazil] (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/315431). In this year we managed to organize two days of lectures! On the 14th of August 2024, Wednesday morning, we were on the [Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of the South of Minas Gerais] (https://portal.ifsuldeminas.edu.br/index.php), (IFSULDEMINAS), Pouso Alegre campus. We did an introductory presentation of the Project Debian, operating system and community, for the three years of the Technical Course in Informatics (professional high school). The event was closed to IFSULDEMINAS students and talked to 60 people. On August 17th, 2024, a Saturday morning, we held the event open to the community at the University of the Sapuca Valley (Univ s), with institutional support of the Information Systems Course. We speak about the Debian Project with Giovani Ferreira (Debian Developer); about the Debian pt_BR translation team with Thiago Pezzo; about everyday experiences using free software with Virginia Cardoso; and on how to set up a development environment ready for production using Debian and Docker with Marcos Ant nio dos Santos. After the lectures, snacks, coffee and cake were served, while the participants talked, asked questions and shared experiences. We would like to thank all the people who have helped us:

• Michelle Nery (IFSULDEMINAS) and Andr Martins (UNIV S) for the aid in the local organization - Paulo Santana (Debian Brazil) by the general organization
• Virginia Cardoso, Giovani Ferreira, Marco Ant nio and Thiago Pezzo for the lectures - And a special thanks to all of you who participated in our celebratio

Some pictures from Pouso Alegre:

This year's Debian day was a pretty special one, we are celebrating 30 years! Giving the importance of this event, the Brazilian community planned a very special week. Instead of only local gatherings, we had a week of online talks streamed via Debian Brazil's youtube channel (soon the recordings will be uploaded to Debian's peertube instance). Nonetheless the local celebrations happened around the country and I've organized one in S o Carlos with the help of GELOS, the FLOSS group at University of S o Paulo. The event happened on August 19th and went on the whole afternoon. We had some talks about Debian and free software (see table below), a coffee break where we had the chance to talk, and finished with a group photo (check this one and many others below). Actually, it wasn't the end, we carried on the conversation about Debian and free software in a local bar :-) We had around 30 people in the event and reached a greater audience via the announcements across the university's press releases and emails sent to our Brazilian mailing lists. You can check some of them below.

• Local campus press release - Computing institute press release - Engineering institute press release - Federal institute press release - Debian-br-eventos email Below you can check the list of talks.

Time Author Title ----- -------- ------ 14:10 GELOS Intro to GELOS 14:30 Carlos Melara (Charles) A ~~not so~~ Brief Introdution to the Debian Project 15:15 Guilherme Paix o Debian and the Free Culture 15:45 z Free Software: the paths to a free life 16:15 -- Coffee Break 17:15 Prof. Dr. Francisco Jos Monaco The FOSS Ecosystem and You Here are some photos taken during the event! Getting things ready for the event. Intro to GELOS talk. A ~~not so~~ Brief Introdution to the Debian Project talk. Everyone already knew Debian! Debian and the Free Culture talk People in the auditorium space. Free Software: the paths to a free life talk Coffee Break. The FOSS Ecosystem and You talk. Group photo. Celebration goes on in the bar.

---

title: Debian Day 30 years online in Brazil description: by Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls) published: true date: 2025-03-01T17:39:03.284Z tags: blog, english editor: markdown dateCreated: 2023-08-25T16:00:00.000Z In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old! To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian's life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years. Two talks were held per night, from 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm, streamed on the Debian Brasil channel on YouTube totaling 10 talks. The recordings are also available on the Debian Brazil channel on Peertube. We had the participation of 9 DDs, 1 DM, 3 contributors in 10 activities. The live audience varied a lot, and the peak was on the preseed talk with Eriberto Mota when we had 47 people watching. Thank you to all participants for the contribution you made to the success of our event.

• Antonio Terceiro
• Aquila Macedo
• Charles Melara
• Daniel Lenharo de Souza
• David Polverari
• Eriberto Mota
• Giovani Ferreira
• Jefferson Maier
• Lucas Kanashiro
• Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana
• Sergio Durigan Junior
• Thais Araujo
• Thiago Andrade

Veja abaixo as fotos de cada atividade: Nova gera o: uma entrevista com iniciantes no projeto Debian Instala o personalizada e automatizada do Debian com preseed Manipulando patches com git-buildpackage debian.social: Socializando Debian do jeito Debian Proxy reverso com WireGuard Celebra o dos 30 anos do Debian! Instalando o Debian em disco criptografado com LUKS O que a equipe de localiza o j conquistou nesses 30 anos Debian - Projeto e Comunidade! Design Gr fico e Software livre, o que fazer e por onde come ar

I have been testing fish for a couple months now (this file started on 2025-01-03T23:52:15-0500 according to stat(1)), and those are my notes. I suspect people will have Opinions about my comments here. Do not comment unless you have some Constructive feedback to provide: I don't want to know if you think I am holding it Wrong. Consider that I might have used UNIX shells for longer that you have lived. I'm not sure I'll keep using fish, but so far it's the first shell that survived heavy use outside of zsh(1) (unless you count tcsh(1), but that was in another millenia). My normal shell is bash(1), and it's still the shell I used everywhere else than my laptop, as I haven't switched on all the servers I managed, although it is available since August 2022 on torproject.org servers. I first got interested in fish because they ported to Rust, making it one of the rare shells out there written in a "safe" and modern programming language, released after an impressive ~2 year of work with Fish 4.0.

Cool things Current directory gets shortened, ~/wikis/anarc.at/software/desktop/wayland shows up as ~/w/a/s/d/wayland Autocompletion rocks. Default prompt rocks. Doesn't seem vulnerable to command injection assaults, at least it doesn't trip on the git-landmine. It even includes pipe status output, which was a huge pain to implement in bash. Made me realized that if the last command succeeds, we don't see other failures, which is the case of my current prompt anyways! Signal reporting is better than my bash implementation too. So far the only modification I have made to the prompt is to add a printf '\a' to output a bell. By default, fish keeps a directory history (but separate from the pushd stack), that can be navigated with cdh, prevd, and nextd, dirh shows the history.

Less cool I feel there's visible latency in the prompt creation. POSIX-style functions (foo() true ) are unsupported. Instead, fish uses whitespace-sensitive definitions like this:

function foo
    true
end

This means my (modest) collection of POSIX functions need to be ported to fish. Workaround: simple functions can be turned into aliases, which fish supports (but implements using functions). EOF heredocs are considered to be "minor syntactic sugar". I find them frigging useful. Process substitution is split on newlines, not whitespace. you need to pipe through string split -n " " to get the equivalent. <(cmd) doesn't exist: they claim you can use cmd foo - as a replacement, but that's not correct: I used <(cmd) mostly where foo does not support - as a magic character to say 'read from stdin'. Documentation is... limited. It seems mostly geared the web docs which are... okay (but I couldn't find out about ~/.config/fish/conf.d there!), but this is really inconvenient when you're trying to browse the manual pages. For example, fish thinks there's a fish_prompt manual page, according to its own completion mechanism, but man(1) cannot find that manual page. I can't find the manual for the time command (which is actually a keyword!) Fish renders multi-line commands with newlines. So if your terminal looks like this, say:

anarcat@angela:~> sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-
95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyrin
g/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy

... but it's actually one line, when you copy-paste the above, in foot(1), it will show up exactly like this, newlines and all:

sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-
95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyrin
g/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy

Whereas it should show up like this:

sq keyring merge torproject-keyring/lavamind-95F341D746CF1FC8B05A0ED5D3F900749268E55E.gpg torproject-keyring/weasel-E3ED482E44A53F5BBE585032D50F9EBC09E69937.gpg   wl-copy

Note that this is an issue specific to foot(1), alacritty(1) and gnome-terminal(1) don't suffer from that issue. I have already filed it upstream in foot and it is apparently fixed already. Globbing is driving me nuts. You can't pass a * to a command unless fish agrees it's going to match something. You need to escape it if it doesn't immediately match, and then you need the called command to actually support globbing. 202[345] doesn't match folders named 2023, 2024, 2025, it will send the string 202[345] to the command.

Blockers () is like $(): it's process substitution, and not a subshell. This is really impractical: I use ( cd foo ; do_something) all the time to avoid losing the current directory... I guess I'm supposed to use pushd for this, but ouch. This wouldn't be so bad if it was just for cd though. Clean constructs like this:

( git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py )   sort -u

Turn into what i find rather horrible:

begin; git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py ; end   sort -ub

It... works, but it goes back to "oh dear, now there's a new langage again". I only found out about this construct while trying:

  git grep -l '^#!/.*bin/python' ; fdfind .py     sort -u 

... which fails and suggests using begin/end, at which point: why not just support the curly braces? FOO=bar is not allowed. It's actually recognized syntax, but creates a warning. We're supposed to use set foo bar instead. This really feels like a needless divergence from standard. Aliases are... peculiar. Typical constructs like alias mv="\mv -i" don't work because fish treats aliases as a function definition, and \ is not magical there. This can be worked around by specifying the full path to the command, with e.g. alias mv="/bin/mv -i". Another problem is trying to override a built-in, which seems completely impossible. In my case, I like the time(1) command the way it is, thank you very much, and fish provides no way to bypass that builtin. It is possible to call time(1) with command time, but it's not possible to replace the command keyword so that means a lot of typing. Again: you can't use \ to bypass aliases. This is a huge annoyance for me. I would need to learn to type command in long form, and I use that stuff pretty regularly. I guess I could alias command to c or something, but this is one of those huge muscle memory challenges. alt . doesn't always work the way i expect.

Review: A Little Vice, by Erin E. Elkin

Publisher:	Erin Elkin
Copyright:	June 2024
ASIN:	B0CTHRK61X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	398

A Little Vice is a stand-alone self-published magical girl novel. It is the author's first novel. C is a high school student and frequent near-victim of monster attacks. Due to the nefarious work of Avaritia Wolf and her allies, his high school is constantly attacked by Beasts, who are magical corruptions of some internal desire taken to absurd extremes. Standing in their way are the Angelic Saints: magical girls who transform into Saint Castitas, Saint Diligentia, and Saint Temperantia and fight the monsters. The monsters for some reason seem disposed to pick C as their victim for hostage-taking, mind control, use as a human shield, and other rather traumatic activities. He's always rescued by the Saints before any great harm is done, but in some ways this makes the situation worse. It is obvious to C that the Saints are his three friends Inessa, Ida, and Temperance, even though no one else seems able to figure this out despite the blatant clues. Inessa has been his best friend since childhood when she was awkward and needed his support. Now, she and his other friends have become literal heroes, beautiful and powerful and capable, constantly protecting the school and innocent people, and C is little more than a helpless burden to be rescued. More than anything else, he wishes he could be an Angelic Saint like them, but of course the whole idea is impossible. Boys don't get to be magical girls. (I'm using he/him pronouns for C in this review because C uses them for himself for most of the book.) This is a difficult book to review because it is deeply focused on portraying a specific internal emotional battle in all of its sometimes-ugly complexity, and to some extent it prioritizes that portrayal over conventional story-telling. You have probably already guessed that this is a transgender coming-out story Elkin's choice of the magical girl genre was done with deep understanding of its role in transgender narratives but more than that, it is a transgender coming-out story of a very specific and closely-observed type. C knows who he wishes he was, but he is certain that this transformation is absolutely impossible. He is very deep in a cycle of self-loathing for wanting something so manifestly absurd and insulting to people who have the virtues that C does not. A Little Vice is told in the first person from C's perspective, and most of this book is a relentless observation of C's anxiety and shame spiral and reflexive deflection of any possibility of a way out. This is very well-written: Elkin knows the reader is going to disagree with C's internalized disgust and hopelessness, knows the reader desperately wants C to break out of that mindset, and clearly signals in a myriad of adroit ways that Elkin is on the reader's side and does not agree with C's analysis. C's friends are sympathetic, good-hearted people, and while sometimes oblivious, it is obvious to the reader that they're also on the reader's side and would help C in a heartbeat if they saw an opening. But much of the point of the book is that it's not that easy, that breaking out of the internal anxiety spiral is nearly impossible, and that C is very good at rejecting help, both because he cannot imagine what form it could take but also because he is certain that he does not deserve it. In other words, much of the reading experience of this book involves watching C torture and insult himself. It's all the more effective because it isn't gratuitous. C's internal monologue sounds exactly like how an anxiety spiral feels, complete with the sort of half-effective coping mechanisms, deflections, and emotional suppression one develops to blunt that type of emotional turmoil. I normally hate this kind of book. I am a happy ending and competence porn reader by default. The world is full of enough pain that I don't turn to fiction to read about more pain. It says a lot about how well-constructed this book is that I stuck with it. Elkin is going somewhere with the story, C gets moments of joy and delight along the way to keep the reader from bogging down completely, and the best parts of the book feel like a prolonged musical crescendo with suspended chords. There is a climax coming, but Elkin is going to make you wait for it for far longer than you want to. The main element that protects A Little Vice from being too grim is that it is a genre novel that is very playful about both magical girls and superhero tropes in general. I've already alluded to one of those elements: Elkin plays with the Mask Principle (the inability of people to see through entirely obvious secret identities) in knowing and entertaining ways. But there are also villains, and that leads me to the absolutely delightful Avaritia Wolf, who for me was the best character in this book. The Angelic Saints are not the only possible approach to magical girl powers in this universe. There are villains who can perform a similar transformation, except they embrace a vice rather than a virtue. Avaritia Wolf embraces the vice of greed. They (Avaritia's pronouns change over the course of the book) also have a secret identity, which I suspect will be blindingly obvious to most readers but which I'll avoid mentioning since it's still arguably a spoiler. The primary plot arc of this book is an attempt to recruit C to the side of the villains. The Beasts are drawn to him because he has magical potential, and the villains are less picky about gender. This initially involves some creepy and disturbing mind control, but it also brings C into contact with Avaritia and Avaritia's very specific understanding of greed. As far as Avaritia is concerned, greed means wanting whatever they want, for whatever reason they feel like wanting it, and there is absolutely no reason why that shouldn't include being greedy for their friends to be happy. Or doing whatever they can to make their friends happy, whether or not that looks like villainy. Elkin does two things with this plot that I thought were remarkably skillful. The first is that she directly examines and then undermines the "easy" transgender magical girl ending. In a world of transformation magic, someone who wants to be a girl could simply turn into a girl and thus apparently resolve the conflict in a way that makes everyone happy. I think there is an important place for that story (I am a vigorous defender of escapist fantasy and happy endings), but that is not the story that Elkin is telling. I won't go into the details of why and how the story complicates and undermines this easy ending, but it's a lot of why this book feels both painful and honest to a specific, and very not easy, transgender experience, even though it takes place in an utterly unrealistic world. But the second, which is more happy and joyful, is that Avaritia gleefully uses a wholehearted embrace of every implication of the vice of greed to bulldoze the binary morality of the story and question the classification of human emotions into virtues and vices. They are not a hero, or even all that good; they have some serious flaws and a very anarchic attitude towards society. But Avaritia provides the compelling, infectious thrill of the character who looks at the social construction of morality that is constraining the story and decides that it's all bullshit and refuses to comply. This is almost the exact opposite of C's default emotional position at the start of the book, and watching the two characters play off of each other in a complex friendship is an absolute delight. The ending of this book is complicated, messy, and incomplete. It is the sort of ending that I think could be incredibly powerful if it hits precisely the right chords with the reader, but if you're not that reader, it can also be a little heartbreaking because Elkin refuses to provide an easy resolution. The ending also drops some threads that I wish Elkin hadn't dropped; there are some characters who I thought deserved a resolution that they don't get. But this is one of those books where the author knows exactly what story they're trying to tell and tells it whether or not that fits what the reader wants. Those books are often not easy reading, but I think there's something special about them. This is not the novel for people who want detailed world-building that puts a solid explanation under events. I thought Elkin did a great job playing with the conventions of an episodic anime, including starting the book on Episode 12 to imply C's backstory with monster attacks and hinting at a parallel light anime story by providing TV-trailer-style plot summaries and teasers at the start and end of each chapter. There is a fascinating interplay between the story in which the Angelic Saints are the protagonists, which the reader can partly extrapolate, and the novel about C that one is actually reading. But the details of the world-building are kept at the anime plot level: There's an arch-villain, a World Tree, and a bit of backstory, but none of it makes that much sense or turns into a coherent set of rules. This is a psychological novel; the background and rules exist to support C's story. If you do want that psychological novel... well, I'm not sure whether to recommend this book or not. I admire the construction of this book a great deal, but I don't think appealing to the broadest possible audience was the goal. C's anxiety spiral is very repetitive, because anxiety spirals are very repetitive, and you have to be willing to read for the grace notes on the doom loop if you're going to enjoy this book. The sentence-by-sentence writing quality is fine but nothing remarkable, and is a bit shy of the average traditionally-published novel. The main appeal of A Little Vice is in the deep and unflinching portrayal of a specific emotional journey. I think this book is going to work if you're sufficiently invested in that journey that you are willing to read the brutal and repetitive parts. If you're not, there's a chance you will bounce off this hard. I was invested, and I'm glad I read this, but caveat emptor. You may want to try a sample first. One final note: If you're deep in the book world, you may wonder, like I did, if the title is a reference to Hanya Yanagihara's (in)famous A Little Life. I do not know for certain I have not read that book because I am not interested in being emotionally brutalized but if it is, I don't think there is much similarity. Both books are to some extent about four friends, but I couldn't find any other obvious connections from some Wikipedia reading, and A Little Vice, despite C's emotional turmoil, seems to be considerably more upbeat. Content notes: Emotionally abusive parent, some thoughts of self-harm, mind control, body dysmorphia, and a lot (a lot) of shame and self-loathing. Rating: 7 out of 10

Oliver Lindburg wrote an interesting article about Designing for Crisis [1]. Bruce Schneier blogged about how to cryptographically identify other humans in advance of AT technology allowing faking people you know [2]. Anarcat has an interesting review of qalc which is a really good calculator, I ll install it on all my workstations [3]. It even does furlongs per fortnight! This would be good to be called from a LLM system when someone asks about mathematical things. Krebs has an informative article about a criminal employed by Elon s DOGE [4]. Conservatives tend to be criminals. Krebs wrote an interesting article about the security of the iOS (and presumably Android) apps for DeekSeek [5]. Seems that the DeepSeek people did everything wrong. Bruce Schneier and Davi Ottenheimer wrote an insightful article DOGE as a National Cyberattack [6]. Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan wrote an insightful article about why and how computer generated voices should sound robotic [7]. Cory Doctorow has an interesting approach to the trade war between the US and Canada, instead of putting tarrifs on imports from the US the Canadian government should make it legal for Canadians to unlock their own property [8]. This youtube video about designing a compressed air engine for a model plane is interesting [9]. Krebs has an interesting article on phishing and mobile phone wallets, Google and Apple need to restrict the number of wallets per phone [10]. The Daily WTF has a good summary of why Elon s DOGE organisation is badly designed and run and a brief mention of how it damages the US [11]. ArsTechnica has an informative article about device code phishing [12]. The increased use of single-sign-on is going to make this more of a problem. Shrivu wrote an insightful and informative article on how to backdoor LLMs [13]. Cory Doctorow wrote an informative post about MLMs and how they are the mirror world version of community organising [14].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2cmk6g6a
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2d6ynkp4
• [3] https://anarc.at/blog/2025-02-08-qalculate-hacks/
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2yo9gp6b
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/249swu8d
• [6] https://tinyurl.com/23soj7ya
• [7] https://tinyurl.com/22eq6gee
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/2xueute7
• [9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udI2dWmwMUE
• [10] https://tinyurl.com/24tbqdjm
• [11] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/walking-the-doge
• [12] https://tinyurl.com/27zf3yjt
• [13] https://tinyurl.com/26tpcu7f
• [14] https://tinyurl.com/2bwqq4xp

Review: The Scavenger Door, by Suzanne Palmer

Series:	Finder Chronicles #3
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2021
ISBN:	0-7564-1516-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	458

The Scavenger Door is a science fiction adventure and the third book of the Finder Chronicles. While each of the books of this series stand alone reasonably well, I would still read the series in order. Each book has some spoilers for the previous book. Fergus is back on Earth following the events of Driving the Deep, at loose ends and annoying his relatives. To get him out of their hair, his cousin sends him into the Scottish hills to find a friend's missing flock of sheep. Fergus finds things professionally, but usually not livestock. It's an easy enough job, though; the lead sheep was wearing a tracker and he just has to get close enough to pick it up. The unexpected twist is also finding a metal fragment buried in a hillside that has some strange resonance with the unwanted gift that Fergus got in Finder. Fergus's alien friend Ignatio is so alarmed by the metal fragment that he turns up in person in Fergus's cousin's bar in Scotland. Before he arrives, Fergus gets a mysteriously infuriating warning visit from alien acquaintances he does not consider friends. He has, as usual, stepped into something dangerous and complicated, and now somehow it's become his problem. So, first, we get lots of Ignatio, who is an enthusiastic large ball of green fuzz with five limbs who mostly speaks English but does so from an odd angle. This makes me happy because I love Ignatio and his tendency to take things just a bit too literally.

SANTO'S, the sign read. Under it, in smaller letters, was CURIOSITIES AND INCONVENIENCES FOR COMMENDABLE SUMS. "Inconveniences sound just like my thing," Fergus said. "You two want to wait in the car while I check it out?" "Oh, no, I am not missing this," Isla said, and got out of the podcar. "I am uncertain," Ignatio said. "I would like some curiouses, but not any inconveniences. Please proceed while I decide, and if there is also murdering or calamity or raisins, you will yell right away, yes?"

Also, if your story setup requires a partly-understood alien artifact that the protagonist can get some explanations for but not have the mystery neatly solved for them, Ignatio's explanations are perfect.

"It is a door. A doorbell. A... peephole? A key. A control light. A signal. A stop-and-go sign. A road. A bridge. A beacon. A call. A map. A channel. A way," Ignatio said. "It is a problem to explain. To say a doorkey is best, and also wrong. If put together, a path may be opened." "And then?" "And then the bad things on the other side, who we were trying to lock away, will be free to travel through."

Second, the thing about Palmer's writing that continues to impress me is her ability to take a standard science fiction plot, one whose variations I've read probably dozens of times before, and still make it utterly engrossing. This book is literally a fetch quest. There are a bunch of scattered fragments, Fergus has to find them and keep them from being assembled, various other people are after the same fragments, and Fergus either has to get there first or get the fragments back from them. If you haven't read this book before, you've played the video game or watched the movie. The threat is basically a Stargate SG-1 plot. And yet, this was so much fun. The characters are great. This book leans less on found family than the last one and a bit more on actual family. When I started reading this series, Fergus felt a bit bland in the way that adventure protagonists sometimes can, but he's fleshed out nicely as the series goes along. He's not someone who tends to indulge in big emotions, but now the reader can tell that's because he's the kind of person who finds things to do in order to keep from dwelling on things he doesn't want to think about. He's unflappable in a quietly competent way while still having a backstory and emotional baggage and a rich inner life that the reader sees in glancing fragments. We get more of Fergus's backstory, particularly around Mars, but I like that it's told in anecdotes and small pieces. The last thing Fergus wants to do is wallow in his past trauma, so he doesn't and finds something to do instead. There's just enough detail around the edges to deepen his character without turning the book into a story about Fergus's emotions and childhood. It's a tricky balancing act that Palmer handles well. There are also more sentient ships, and I am so in favor of more sentient ships.

"When I am adding a new skill, I import diagnostic and environmental information specific to my platform and topology, segregate the skill subroutines to a dedicated, protected logical space, run incremental testing on integration under all projected scenarios and variables, and then when I am persuaded the code is benevolent, an asset, and provides the functionality I was seeking, I roll it into my primary processing units," Whiro said. "You cannot do any of that, because if I may speak in purely objective terms you may incorrectly interpret as personal, you are made of squishy, unreliable goo."

We get the normal pieces of a well-done fetch quest: wildly varying locations, some great local characters (the US-based trauma surgeons on vacation in Australia were my favorites), and believable antagonists. There are two other groups looking for the fragments, and while one of them is the standard villain in this sort of story, the other is an apocalyptic cult whose members Fergus mostly feels sorry for and who add just the right amount of surreality to the story. The more we find out about them, the more believable they are, and the more they make this world feel like realistic messy chaos instead of the obvious (and boring) good versus evil patterns that a lot of adventure plots collapse into. There are things about this book that I feel like I should be criticizing, but I just can't. Fetch quests are usually synonymous with lazy plotting, and yet it worked for me. The way Fergus gets dumped into the middle of this problem starts out feeling as arbitrary and unmotivated as some video game fetch quest stories, but by the end of the book it starts to make sense. The story could arguably be described as episodic and cliched, and yet I was thoroughly invested. There are a few pacing problems at the very end, but I was too invested to care that much. This feels like a book that's better than the sum of its parts. Most of the story is future-Earth adventure with some heist elements. The ending goes in a rather different direction but stays at the center of the classic science fiction genre. The Scavenger Door reaches a satisfying conclusion, but there are a ton of unanswered questions that will send me on to the fourth (and reportedly final) novel in the series shortly. This is great stuff. It's not going to win literary awards, but if you're in the mood for some classic science fiction with fun aliens and neat ideas, but also benefiting from the massive improvements in characterization the genre has seen in the past forty years, this series is perfect. Highly recommended. Followed by Ghostdrift. Rating: 9 out of 10

20 years ago, I got my Debian Developer account. I was 18 at the time, it was Shrove Tuesday and - as is customary - I was drunk when I got the email. There was so much that I did not know - which is also why the process took 1.5 years from the time I applied. I mostly only maintained a package or two. I'm still amazed that Christian Perrier and Joerg Jaspert put sufficient trust in me at that time. Nevertheless now feels like a good time for a personal reflection of my involvement in Debian.
During my studies I took on more things. In January 2008 I joined the Release Team as an assistant, which taught me a lot of code review. I have been an Application Manager on the side.
Going to my first Debconf was really a turning point. My first one was Mar del Plata in Argentina in August 2008, when I was 21. That was quite an excitement, traveling that far from Germany for the first time. The personal connections I made there made quite the difference. It was also a big boost for motivation. I attended 8 (Argentina), 9 (Spain), 10 (New York), 11 (Bosnia and Herzegovina), 12 (Nicaragua), 13 (Switzerland), 14 (Portland), 15 (Germany), 16 (South Africa), and hopefully I'll make it to this year's in Brest. At all of them I did not see much of the countries as I prioritized all of my time focused on Debian, even skipping some of the day trips in favor of team meetings. Yet I am very grateful to the project (and to my employer) for shipping me there.I ended up as Stable Release Manager for a while, from August 2008 - when Martin Zobel-Helas moved into DSA - until I got dropped in March 2020. I think my biggest achievements were pushing for the creation of -updates in favor of a separate volatile archive and a change of the update policy to allow for more common sense updates in the main archive vs. the very strict "breakage or security" policy we had previously. I definitely need to call out Adam D. Barratt for being the partner in crime, holding up the fort for even longer.In 2009 I got too annoyed at the existing wanna-build team not being responsive anymore and pushed for the system to be given to a new team. I did not build it and significant contributions were done by other people (like Andreas Barth and Joachim Breitner, and later Aurelien Jarno). I mostly reworked the way the system was triggered, investigated when it broke and was around when people wanted things merged.
In the meantime I worked sys/netadmin jobs while at university, both paid and as a volunteer with the students' council. For a year or two I was the administrator of a System z mainframe IBM donated to my university. We had a mainframe course and I attended two related conferences. That's where my s390(x) interest came from, although credit for the port needs to go to Aurelien Jarno.
Since completing university in 2013 I have been working for a company for almost 12 years. Debian experience was very relevant to the job and I went on maintaining a Linux distro or two at work - before venturing off into security hardening. People in megacorps - in my humble opinion - disappear from the volunteer projects because a) they might previously have been studying and thus had a lot more time on their hands and b) the job is too similar to the volunteer work and thus the same brain cells used for work are exhausted and can't be easily reused for volunteer work. I kept maintaining a couple of things (buildds, some packages) - mostly because of a sense of commitment and responsibility, but otherwise kind of scaled down my involvement. I also felt less connected as I dropped off IRC.Last year I finally made it to Debian events again: MiniDebconf in Berlin, where we discussed the aftermath of the xz incident, and the Debian BSP in Salzburg. I rejoined IRC using the Matrix bridge. That also rekindled my involvement, with me guiding a new DD through NM and ending up in DSA. To be honest, only in the last two or three years I felt like a (more) mature old-timer.
I have a new gig at work lined up to start soon and next to that I have sysadmining for Debian. It is pretty motivating to me that I can just get things done - something that is much harder to achieve at work due to organizational complexities. It balances out some frustration I'd otherwise have. The work is different enough to be enjoyable and the people I work with are great.

The future
I still think the work we do in Debian is important, as much as I see a lack of appreciation in a world full of containers. We are reaping most of the benefits of standing on the shoulders of giants and of great decisions made in the past (e.g. the excellent Debian policy, but also the organizational model) that made Debian what it is today.Given the increase in size and complexity of what Debian ships - and the somewhat dwindling resource of developer time, it would benefit us to have better processes for large-scale changes across all packages. I greatly respect the horizontal effects that are currently being driven and that suck up a lot of energy.A lot of our infrastructure is also aging and not super well maintained. Many take it for granted that the services we have keep existing, but most are only maintained by a person or two, if even. Software stacks are aging and it is even a struggle to have all necessary packages in the next release.Hopefully I can contribute a bit or two to these efforts in the future.

Well, 2024 will be remembered, won't it? I guess 2025 already wants to make its mark too, but let's not worry about that right now, and instead let's talk about me. A little over a year ago, I was gloating over how I had such a great blogging year in 2022, and was considering 2023 to be average, then went on to gather more stats and traffic analysis... Then I said, and I quote:

I hope to write more next year. I've been thinking about a few posts I could write for work, about how things work behind the scenes at Tor, that could be informative for many people. We run a rather old setup, but things hold up pretty well for what we throw at it, and it's worth sharing that with the world...

What a load of bollocks.

A bad year for this blog 2024 was the second worst year ever in my blogging history, tied with 2009 at a measly 6 posts for the year:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ curl -sSL https://anarc.at/blog/   grep 'href="\./'   grep -o 20[0-9][0-9]   sort   uniq -c   sort -nr   grep -v 2025   tail -3
      6 2024
      6 2009
      3 2014

I did write about my work though, detailing the migration from Gitolite to GitLab we completed that year. But after August, total radio silence until now.

Loads of drafts It's not that I have nothing to say: I have no less than five drafts in my working tree here, not counting three actual drafts recorded in the Git repository here:

anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ git s blog
## main...origin/main
?? blog/bell-bot.md
?? blog/fish.md
?? blog/kensington.md
?? blog/nixos.md
?? blog/tmux.md
anarcat@angela:anarc.at$ git grep -l '\!tag draft'
blog/mobile-massive-gallery.md
blog/on-dying.mdwn
blog/secrets-recovery.md

I just don't have time to wrap those things up. I think part of me is disgusted by seeing my work stolen by large corporations to build proprietary large language models while my idols have been pushed to suicide for trying to share science with the world. Another part of me wants to make those things just right. The "tagged drafts" above are nothing more than a huge pile of chaotic links, far from being useful for anyone else than me, and even then. The on-dying article, in particular, is becoming my nemesis. I've been wanting to write that article for over 6 years now, I think. It's just too hard.

Writing elsewhere There's also the fact that I write for work already. A lot. Here are the top-10 contributors to our team's wiki:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git shortlog --numbered --summary --group="format:%al"   head -10
  4272  anarcat
   423  jerome
   117  zen
   116  lelutin
   104  peter
    58  kez
    45  irl
    43  hiro
    18  gaba
    17  groente

... but that's a bit unfair, since I've been there half a decade. Here's the last year:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git shortlog --since=2024-01-01 --numbered --summary --group="format:%al"   head -10
   827  anarcat
   117  zen
   116  lelutin
    91  jerome
    17  groente
    10  gaba
     8  micah
     7  kez
     5  jnewsome
     4  stephen.swift

So I still write the most commits! But to truly get a sense of the amount I wrote in there, we should count actual changes. Here it is by number of lines (from commandlinefu.com):

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ git ls-files   xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain   sed -n 's/^author //p'   sort -f   uniq -ic   sort -nr   head -10
  99046 Antoine Beaupr 
   6900 Zen Fu
   4784 J r me Charaoui
   1446 Gabriel Filion
   1146 Jerome Charaoui
    837 groente
    705 kez
    569 Gaba
    381 Matt Traudt
    237 Stephen Swift

That, of course, is the entire history of the git repo, again. We should take only the last year into account, and probably ignore the tails directory, as sneaky Zen Fu imported the entire docs from another wiki there...

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ find [d-s]* -type f -mtime -365   xargs -n1 git blame --line-porcelain 2>/dev/null   sed -n 's/^author //p'   sort -f   uniq -ic   sort -nr   head -10
  75037 Antoine Beaupr 
   2932 J r me Charaoui
   1442 Gabriel Filion
   1400 Zen Fu
    929 Jerome Charaoui
    837 groente
    702 kez
    569 Gaba
    381 Matt Traudt
    237 Stephen Swift

Pretty good! 75k lines. But those are the files that were modified in the last year. If we go a little more nuts, we find that:

anarcat@angela:help.torproject.org$ $ git-count-words-range.py    sort -k6 -nr   head -10
parsing commits for words changes from command: git log '--since=1 year ago' '--format=%H %al'
anarcat 126116 - 36932 = 89184
zen 31774 - 5749 = 26025
groente 9732 - 607 = 9125
lelutin 10768 - 2578 = 8190
jerome 6236 - 2586 = 3650
gaba 3164 - 491 = 2673
stephen.swift 2443 - 673 = 1770
kez 1034 - 74 = 960
micah 772 - 250 = 522
weasel 410 - 0 = 410

I wrote 126,116 words in that wiki, only in the last year. I also deleted 37k words, so the final total is more like 89k words, but still: that's about forty (40!) articles of the average size (~2k) I wrote in 2022. (And yes, I did go nuts and write a new log parser, essentially from scratch, to figure out those word diffs. I did get the courage only after asking GPT-4o for an example first, I must admit.) Let's celebrate that again: I wrote 90 thousand words in that wiki in 2024. According to Wikipedia, a "novella" is 17,500 to 40,000 words, which would mean I wrote about a novella and a novel, in the past year. But interestingly, if I look at the repository analytics. I certainly didn't write that much more in the past year. So that alone cannot explain the lull in my production here.

Arguments Another part of me is just tired of the bickering and arguing on the internet. I have at least two articles in there that I suspect is going to get me a lot of push-back (NixOS and Fish). I know how to deal with this: you need to write well, consider the controversy, spell it out, and defuse things before they happen. But that's hard work and, frankly, I don't really care that much about what people think anymore. I'm not writing here to convince people. I have stop evangelizing a long time ago. Now, I'm more into documenting, and teaching. And, while teaching, there's a two-way interaction: when you give out a speech or workshop, people can ask questions, or respond, and you all learn something. When you document, you quickly get told "where is this? I couldn't find it" or "I don't understand this" or "I tried that and it didn't work" or "wait, really? shouldn't we do X instead", and you learn. Here, it's static. It's my little soapbox where I scream in the void. The only thing people can do is scream back.

Collaboration So. Let's see if we can work together here. If you don't like something I say, disagree, or find something wrong or to be improved, instead of screaming on social media or ignoring me, try contributing back. This site here is backed by a git repository and I promise to read everything you send there, whether it is an issue or a merge request. I will, of course, still read comments sent by email or IRC or social media, but please, be kind. You can also, of course, follow the latest changes on the TPA wiki. If you want to catch up with the last year, some of the "novellas" I wrote include:

• TPA-RFC-33: Monitoring: Nagios to Prometheus conversion, see also the extensive Prometheus documentation we wrote
• TPA-RFC-45: email architecture: draft of long-term email services at torproject.org
• TPA-RFC-62: TPA password manager: switch to password-store
• TPA-RFC-63: storage server budget: buy a new backup storage server (5k$ + 100$/mth)
• TPA-RFC-65: PostgreSQL backups: switching from legacy to pgBackRest for database backups
• TPA-RFC-68: Idle canary servers: provision test servers that sit idle to monitor infrastructure and stage deployments
• TPA-RFC-71: Emergency email deployments, phase B: deploy a new sender-rewriting mail forwarder, migrate mailing lists off the legacy server to a new machine, migrate the remaining Schleuder list to the Tails server, upgrade eugeni.
• TPA-RFC-76: Puppet merge request workflow: how to mirror our private Puppet repo to GitLab safely
• TPA-RFC-79: General merge request workflows: how to use merge requests, assignees, reviewers, draft and threads on GitLab projects

(Well, no, you can't actually follow changes on a GitLab wiki. But we have a wiki-replica git repository where you can see the latest commits, and subscribe to the RSS feed.) See you there!

Hi In my last blog, I explained how we resolved a throttling issue involving Azure storage API. In the end, I mentioned that I was not sure of the root cause of the throttling issue. Even though we no longer had any problem in dev and preprod cluster, we still faced throttling issue with prod. The main difference between these 2 environments is that we have about 80 PVs in prod versus 15 in the other environments. Given that we manage 1500 pods in prod, 80 PVs does not look like a lot. To continue the investigation, I ve modified k8s-scheduled-volume-snapshotter to limit the number of snaphots done in a single cron run (see add maxSnapshotCount parameter pull request). In prod, we used the modified snapshotter to trigger snapshots one by one. Even with all previous snapshots cleaned up, we could not trigger a single new snapshot without being throttled. I guess that, in the cron job, just checking the list of PV to snapshot was enough to exhaust our API quota. Azure doc mention that a leaky bucket algorithm is used for throttling. A full bucket holds tokens for 250 API calls, and the bucket gets 25 new tokens per second. Looks like that not enough. I was puzzled and out of ideas . I looked for similar problems in AKS issues on GitHub where I found this comment that recommend using useDataPlaneAPI parameter in the CSI file driver. That was it! I was flabbergasted by this parameter: why is CSI file driver able to use 2 APIs ? Why is one on them so limited ? And more importantly, why is the limited API the default one ? Anyway, setting useDataPlaneAPI: "true" in our VolumeSnapshotClass manifest was the right solution. This indeed solved the throttling issue in our prod cluster. But not the snaphot issue . Amongst the 80 PV, I still had 2 snaphots failing. Fortunately, the error was mentioned in the description of the failed snapshots: we had too many (200) snapshots for these shared volumes. What ?? All these snapshots were cleaned up last week. I then tried to delete these snaphots through azure console. But the console failed to delete these snapshot due to API throttling. Looks like Azure console is not using the right API. Anyway, I went back to the solution explained in my previous blog, I listed all snapshots with az command. I indeed has a lot of snaphots, a lot of them dated Jan 19 and 20. There was often a new bogus snaphot created every minute. These were created during the first attempt at fixing the throttling issue. I guess that even though CSI file driver was throttled, a snaphot was still created in the storage account, but the CSI driver did not see it and retried a minute later. What a mess. Anyway, I ve cleaned up again these bogus snapshot , and now, snaphot creation is working fine . For now. All the best.

My journey in CS has always been driven by curiosity, determination, and a deep love for understanding software solutions at its tiniest, most complex levels. Taking ALX Africa Software Engineer track after High school was where it all started for me. During the 1-year intensive bootcamp, I delved into the intricacies of Linux programming and low-level programming with C, which solidified my foundational knowledge. This experience not only enhanced my technical skills but also taught me the importance of adaptability and self-directed learning. I discovered how to approach challenges with curiosity, igniting a passion for exploring software solutions in their most intricate forms. Each module pushed me to think critically and creatively, transforming my understanding of technology and its capabilities. Let s just say that I have always been drawn to asking, How does this happen?" And I just go on and on until I find an answer eventually and sometimes I don t but that s okay. That curiosity, combined with a deep commitment to learning, has guided my journey. Debian Webmaster My drive has led me to get involved in open-source contributions, where I can put my knowledge to the test while helping my community. Engaging with real-world experts and learning from my mistakes has been invaluable. One of the highlights of this journey was joining the Debian Webmasters team as an intern through Outreachy. Here, I have the honor of working on redesigning and migrating the old Debian webpages to make them more user-friendly. This experience not only allows me to apply my skills in a practical setting but also deepens my understanding of collaborative software development. Building My Skills: The Foundation of My Experience Throughout my academic and professional journey, I have taken on many roles that have shaped my skills and prepared me for what s ahead I believe. I am definitely not a one-trick pony, and maybe not completely a jack of all trade either but I am a bit diverse I d like to think. Here are the key roles that have defined my journey so far: Volunteer Developer at Yoris Africa (June 2022 - August 2023) I began my career by volunteering at Yoris, where I collaborated with a talented team to design and build the frontend for a mobile app. My contributions extended beyond just the frontend; I also worked on backend solutions and microservices, gaining hands-on experience in full-stack development. This role was instrumental in shaping my understanding of software architecture, allowing me to contribute meaningfully to projects while learning from experienced developers in a dynamic environment. Freelance Academics Software Developer (September 2023 - October 2024) I freelanced as an academic software developer, where I pitched and developed software solutions for universities in my community. One of my most notable projects was creating a Computer-Based Testing (CBT) software for a medical school, which featured a unique questionnaire and scoring system tailored to their specific needs. This experience not only allowed me to apply my technical skills in a real-world setting but also deepened my understanding of educational software requirements and user experience, ultimately enhancing the learning process for students. Open Source Intern at Debian Webmaster Team (November 2024 -) Perhaps the most transformative experience has been my role as an intern at Debian Webmasters. This opportunity allowed me to delve into the fascinating world of open source. As an intern, I have the chance to work on a project where we are redesigning and migrating the Debian webpages to utilize a new and faster technology: Go templates with Hugo. For a detailed look at the work and progress I made during my internship, as well as information on this project and how to get involved, you can check out the wiki. My ultimate goal with this role is to build a vibrant community for Debian in Africa and, if given the chance, to host a debian-cd mirror for faster installations in my region. You can connect with me through LinkedIn, or X (formerly Twitter), or reach out via email.

Review: The Sky Road, by Ken MacLeod

Series:	Fall Revolution #4
Publisher:	Tor
Copyright:	1999
Printing:	August 2001
ISBN:	0-8125-7759-0
Format:	Mass market
Pages:	406

The Sky Road is the fourth book in the Fall Revolution series, but it represents an alternate future that diverges after (or during?) the events of The Sky Fraction. You probably want to read that book first, but I'm not sure reading The Stone Canal or The Cassini Division adds anything to this book other than frustration. Much more on that in a moment. Clovis colha Gree is a aspiring doctoral student in history with a summer job as a welder. He works on the platform for the project, which the reader either slowly discovers from the book or quickly discovers from the cover is a rocket to get to orbit. As the story opens, he meets (or, as he describes it) is targeted by a woman named Merrial, a tinker who works on the guidance system. The early chapters provide only a few hints about Clovis's world: a statue of the Deliverer on a horse that forms the backdrop of their meeting, the casual carrying of weapons, hints that tinkers are socially unacceptable, and some division between the white logic and the black logic in programming. Also, because this is a Ken MacLeod novel, everyone is obsessed with smoking and tobacco the way that the protagonists of erotica are obsessed with sex. Clovis's story is one thread of this novel. The other, told in the alternating chapters, is the story of Myra Godwin-Davidova, chair of the governing Council of People's Commissars of the International Scientific and Technical Workers' Republic, a micronation embedded in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Series readers will remember Myra's former lover, David Reid, as the villain of The Stone Canal and the head of the corporation Mutual Protection, which is using slave labor (sort of) to support a resurgent space movement and its attempt to take control of a balkanized Earth. The ISTWR is in decline and a minor power by all standards except one: They still have nuclear weapons. So, first, we need to talk about the series divergence. I know from reading about this book on-line that The Sky Road is an alternate future that does not follow the events of The Stone Canal and The Cassini Division. I do not know this from the text of the book, which is completely silent about even being part of a series. More annoyingly, while the divergence in the Earth's future compared to The Cassini Division is obvious, I don't know what the Jonbar hinge is. Everything I can find on-line about this book is maddeningly coy. Wikipedia claims the divergence happens at the end of The Sky Fraction. Other reviews and the Wikipedia talk page claim it happens in the middle of The Stone Canal. I do have a guess, but it's an unsatisfying one and I'm not sure how to test its correctness. I suppose I shouldn't care and instead take each of the books on their own terms, but this is the type of thing that my brain obsesses over, and I find it intensely irritating that MacLeod didn't explain it in the books themselves. It's the sort of authorial trick that makes me feel dumb, and books that gratuitously make me feel dumb are less enjoyable to read. The second annoyance I have with this book is also only partly its fault. This series, and this book in particular, is frequently mentioned as good political science fiction that explores different ways of structuring human society. This was true of some of the earlier books in a surprisingly superficial way. Here, I would call it hogwash. This book, or at least the Myra portion of it, is full of people doing politics in a tactical sense, but like the previous books of this series, that politics is mostly embedded in personal grudges and prior romantic relationships. Everyone involved is essentially an authoritarian whose ability to act as they wish is only contested by other authoritarians and is largely unconstrained by such things as persuasion, discussions, elections, or even theory. Myra and most of the people she meets are profoundly cynical and almost contemptuous of any true discussion of political systems. This is the trappings and mechanisms of politics without the intellectual debate or attempt at consensus, turning it into a zero-sum game won by whoever can threaten the others more effectively. Given the glowing reviews I've seen in relatively political SF circles, presumably I am missing something that other people see in MacLeod's approach. Perhaps this level of pettiness and cynicism is an accurate depiction of what it's like inside left-wing political movements. (What an appalling condemnation of left-wing political movements, if so.) But many of the on-line reviews lead me to instead conclude that people's understanding of "political fiction" is stunted and superficial. For example, there is almost nothing Marxist about this book it contains essentially no economic or class analysis whatsoever but MacLeod uses a lot of Marxist terminology and sets half the book in an explicitly communist state, and this seems to be enough for large portions of the on-line commentariat to conclude that it's full of dangerous, radical ideas. I find this sadly hilarious given that MacLeod's societies tend, if anything, towards a low-grade libertarianism that would be at home in a Robert Heinlein novel. Apparently political labels are all that's needed to make political fiction; substance is optional. So much for the politics. What's left in Clovis's sections is a classic science fiction adventure in which the protagonist has a radically different perspective from the reader and the fun lies in figuring out the world-building through the skewed perspective of the characters. This was somewhat enjoyable, but would have been more fun if Clovis had any discernible personality. Sadly he instead seems to be an empty receptacle for the prejudices and perspective of his society, which involve a lot of quasi-religious taboos and an essentially magical view of the world. Merrial is a more interesting character, although as always in this series the romance made absolutely no sense to me and seemed to be conjured by authorial fiat and weirdly instant sexual attraction. Myra's portion of the story was the part I cared more about and was more invested in, aided by the fact that she's attempting to do something more interesting than launch a crewed space vehicle for no obvious reason. She at least faces some true moral challenges with no obviously correct response. It's all a bit depressing, though, and I found Myra's unwillingness to ground her decisions in a more comprehensive moral framework disappointing. If you're going to make a protagonist the ruler of a communist state, even an ironic one, I'd like to hear some real political philosophy, some theory of sociology and economics that she used to justify her decisions. The bits that rise above personal animosity and vibes were, I think, said better in The Cassini Division. This series was disappointing, and I can't say I'm glad to have read it. There is some small pleasure in finishing a set of award-winning genre books so that I can have a meaningful conversation about them, but the awards failed to find me better books to read than I would have found on my own. These aren't bad books, but the amount of enjoyment I got out of them didn't feel worth the frustration. Not recommended, I'm afraid. Rating: 6 out of 10

In 2024, I was sponsored by The Document Foundation (TDF) to attend the LibreOffice annual conference in Luxembourg from the 10th to the 12th of October. Being an Indian passport holder, I needed a visa to visit Luxembourg. However, due to my Kenya trip coming up in September, I ran into a dilemma: whether to apply before or after the Kenya trip. To obtain a visa, I needed to submit my application with VFS Global (and not with the Luxembourg embassy directly). Therefore, I checked the VFS website for information on processing time, which says:

As a rule, the processing time of an admissible Schengen visa application should not exceed 15 calendar days (from the date the application is received at the Embassy).

It also mentions:

If the application is received less than 15 calendar days before the intended travel date, the Embassy can deem your application inadmissible. If so, your visa application will not be processed by the Embassy and the application will be sent back to VFS along with the passport.

If I applied for the Luxembourg visa before my trip, I would run the risk of not getting my passport back in time, and therefore missing my Kenya flight. On the other hand, if I waited until after returning from Kenya, I would run afoul of the aforementioned 15 working days needed by the embassy to process my application. I had previously applied for a Schengen visa for Austria, which was completed in 7 working days. My friends who had been to France told me they got their visa decision within a week. So, I compared Luxembourg s application numbers with those of other Schengen countries. In 2023, Luxembourg received 3,090 applications from India, while Austria received 39,558, Italy received 52,332 and France received 176,237. Since Luxembourg receives a far fewer number of applications, I expected the process to be quick. Therefore, I submitted my visa application with VFS Global in Delhi on the 5th of August, giving the embassy a month with 18 working days before my Kenya trip. However, I didn t mention my Kenya trip in the Luxembourg visa application. For reference, here is a list of documents I submitted:

• Passport
• Photocopy of passport data pages
• Visa application form
• One photograph
• Visa appointment confirmation
• Cover letter
• Return flight reservations
• Hotel bookings
• Invitation letter from the conference organizer, TDF
• Confirmation from The Luxembourg Convention Bureau G.I.E - the venue
• Last three months bank account statement with bank seal
• Travel insurance
• Income Tax Return Statement
• Monthly payslips for the last three months

I submitted flight reservations instead of flight tickets . It is because, in case of visa rejection, I would have lost a significant amount of money if I booked confirmed flight tickets. The embassy also recommends the same. After the submission of documents, my fingerprints were taken. The expenses for the visa application were as follows:

Service Description	Amount (INR)
Visa Fee	8,114
VFS Global Fee	1,763
Courier	800
Total	10,677

Going by the emails sent by VFS, my application reached the Luxembourg embassy the next day. Fast-forward to the 27th of August 14th day of my visa application. I had already booked my flight ticket to Nairobi for the 4th of September, but my passport was still with the Luxembourg embassy, and I hadn t heard back. In addition, I also obtained Kenya s eTA and got vaccinated for Yellow Fever, a requirement to travel to Kenya. In order to check on my application status, I gave the embassy a phone call, but missed their calling window, which was easy to miss since it was only 1 hour - 12:00 to 1:00 PM. So, I dropped them an email explaining my situation. At this point, I was already wondering whether to cancel the Kenya trip or the Luxembourg one, if I had to choose. After not getting a response to my email, I called them again the next day. The embassy told me they would look into it and asked me to send my flight tickets over email. One week to go before my flight now. I followed up with the embassy on the 30th by a phone call, and the person who picked up the call told me that my request had already been forwarded to the concerned department and is under process. They asked me to follow up on Monday, 2nd September. During the visa process, I was in touch with three other Indian attendees.¹ In the meantime, I got to know that all of them had applied for a Luxembourg visa by the end of the month of August. Back to our story, over the next two days, the embassy closed for the weekend. I began weighing my options. On one hand, I could cancel the Kenya trip and hope that Luxembourg goes through. Even then, Luxembourg wasn t guaranteed as the visa could get rejected, so I might have ended up missing both the trips. On the other hand, I could cancel the Luxembourg visa application and at least be sure of going to Kenya. However, I thought it would make Luxembourg very unlikely because it didn t leave 15 working days for the embassy to process my visa after returning from Kenya. I also badly wanted to attend the LibreOffice conference because I couldn t make it two years ago. Therefore, I chose not to cancel my Luxembourg visa application. I checked with my travel agent and learned that I could cancel my Nairobi flight before September 4th for a cancelation fee of approximately 7,000 INR. On the 2nd of September, I was a bit frustrated because I hadn t heard anything from the embassy regarding my request. Therefore, I called the embassy again. They assured me that they would arrange a call for me from the concerned department that day, which I did receive later that evening. During the call, they offered to return my passport via VFS the next day and asked me to resubmit it after returning from Kenya. I immediately accepted the offer and was overjoyed, as it would enable me to take my flight to Nairobi without canceling my Luxembourg visa application. However, I didn t have the offer in writing, so it wasn t clear to me how I would collect my passport from VFS. The next day, I would receive it when I would be on my way to VFS in the form of an email from the embassy which read:

Dear Mr. Dwivedi, We acknowledge the receipt of your email. As you requested, we are returning your passport exceptionally through VFS, you can collect it directly from VFS Delhi Center between 14:00-17:00 hrs, 03 Sep 2024. Kindly bring the printout of this email along with your VFS deposit receipt and Original ID proof. Once you are back from your trip, you can redeposit the passport with VFS Luxembourg for our processing. With best regards,
Consular Section GRAND DUCHY OF LUXEMBOURG
Embassy in New Delhi

I took a printout of the email and submitted it to VFS to get my passport. This seemed like a miracle - just when I lost all hope of making it to my Kenya flight and was mentally preparing myself to miss it, I got my passport back exceptionally and now I had to mentally prepare again for Kenya. I had never heard of an embassy returning passport before completing the visa process before. The next day, I took my flight to Nairobi as planned. In case you are interested, I have written two blog posts on my Kenya trip - one on the OpenStreetMap conference in Nairobi and the other on my travel experience in Kenya. After returning from Kenya, I resubmitted my passport on the 17th of September. Fast-forward to the 25th of September; I didn t hear anything from the embassy about my application process. So, I checked with TDF to see whether the embassy reached out to them. They told me they confirmed my participation and my hotel booking to the visa authorities on the 19th of September (6 days ago). I was wondering what was taking so long after the verification. On the 1st of October, I received a phone call from the Luxembourg embassy, which turned out to be a surprise interview. They asked me about my work, my income, how I came to know about the conference, whether I had been to Europe before, etc. The call lasted around 10 minutes. At this point, my travel date - 8th of October - was just two working days away as the 2nd of October was off due to Gandhi Jayanti and 5th and 6th October were weekends, leaving only the 3rd and the 4th. I am not sure why the embassy saved this for the last moment, even though I submitted my application 2 months ago. I also got to know that one of the other Indian attendees missed the call due to being in their college lab, where he was not allowed to take phone calls. Therefore, I recommend that the embassy agree on a time slot for the interview call beforehand. Visa decisions for all the above-mentioned Indian attendees were sent by the embassy on the 4th of October, and I received mine on the 5th. For my travel date of 8th October, this was literally the last moment the embassy could send my visa. The parcel contained my passport and a letter. The visa was attached to a page in the passport. I was happy that my visa had been approved. However, the timing made my task challenging. The enclosed letter stated:

Subject: Your Visa Application for Luxembourg

Dear Applicant, We would like to inform you that a Schengen visa has been granted for the 8-day duration from 08/10/2024 to 30/10/2024 for conference purposes in Luxembourg. You are requested to report back to the Embassy of Luxembourg in New Delhi through an email (email address redacted) after your return with the following documents:

• Immigration Stamps (Entry and Exit of Schengen Area)
• Restaurant Bills
• Shopping/Hotel/Accommodation bills

Failure to report to the Embassy after your return will be taken into consideration for any further visa applications.

I understand the embassy wanting to ensure my entry and exit from the Schengen area during the visa validity period, but found the demand for sending shopping bills excessive. Further, not everyone was as lucky as I was as it took a couple of days for one of the Indian attendees to receive their visa, delaying their plan. Another attendee had to send their father to the VFS center to collect their visa in time, rather than wait for the courier to arrive at their home. Foreign travel is complicated, especially for the citizens of countries whose passports and currencies are weak. Embassies issuing visas a day before the travel date doesn t help. For starters, a last-minute visa does not give enough time for obtaining a forex card as banks ask for the visa. Further, getting foreign currency (Euros in our case) in cash with a good exchange rate becomes difficult. As an example, for the Kenya trip, I had to get US Dollars at the airport due to the plan being finalized at the last moment, worsening the exchange rate. Back to the current case, the flight prices went up significantly compared to September, almost doubling. The choice of airlines also got narrowed, as most of the flights got booked by the time I received my visa. With all that said, I think it was still better than an arbitrary rejection. Credits: Contrapunctus, Badri, Fletcher, Benson, and Anirudh for helping with the draft of this post.

Review: Driving the Deep, by Suzanne Palmer

Series:	Finder Chronicles #2
Publisher:	DAW
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-7564-1512-8
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	426

Driving the Deep is science fiction, a sequel to Finder (not to be confused with Finders, Emma Bull's Finder, or the many other books and manga with the same title). It stands alone and you could start reading here, although there will be spoilers for the first book of the series. It's Suzanne Palmer's second novel. When Fergus Ferguson was fifteen, he stole his cousin's motorcycle to escape an abusive home, stashed it in a storage locker, and got the hell off of Earth. Nineteen years later, he's still paying for the storage locker and it's still bothering him that he never returned the motorcycle. His friends in the Shipyard orbiting Pluto convince him to go to Earth and resolve this ghost of his past, once and for all. Nothing for Fergus is ever that simple. When the key he's been carrying all these years fails to open the storage unit, he hacks it open, only to find no sign of his cousin's motorcycle. Instead, the unit is full of expensive storage crates containing paintings by artists like Van Gogh. They're obviously stolen. Presumably the paintings also explain the irate retired police officer who knocks him out and tries to arrest him, slightly after the urgent message from the Shipyard AI telling him his friends are under attack. Fergus does not stay arrested, a development that will not surprise readers of the previous book. He does end up with an obsessed and increasingly angry ex-cop named Zacker as an unwanted passenger. Fergus reluctantly cuts a deal with Zacker: assist him in finding out what happened to his friends, and Fergus will then go back to Earth and help track down the art thieves who shot Zacker's daughter. It will be some time before they get back to Earth. Fergus's friends have been abducted by skilled professionals. What faint clues he can track down point to Enceladus, a moon of Saturn with a vast subsurface ocean. One simulation test with a desperate and untrustworthy employer later, Fergus is now a newly-hired pilot of an underwater hauler. The trend in recent SFF genre novels has been towards big feelings and character-centric stories. Sometimes this comes in the form of found family, sometimes as melodrama, and often now as romance. I am in general a fan of this trend, particularly as a corrective to the endless engineer-with-a-wrench stories, wooden protagonists, and cardboard characters that plagued classic science fiction. But sometimes I want to read a twisty and intelligent plot navigated by a competent but understated protagonist and built around nifty science fiction ideas. That is exactly what Driving the Deep is, and I suspect this series is going to become my go-to recommendation for people who "just want a science fiction novel." I don't want to overstate this. Fergus is not a blank slate; he gets the benefit of the dramatic improvement in writing standards and characterization in SFF over the past thirty years. He's still struggling with what happened to him in Finder, and the ending of this book is rather emotional. But the overall plot structure is more like a thriller or a detective novel: there are places to go, people to investigate, bases to infiltrate, and captives to find, so the amount of time spent on emotional processing is necessarily limited. Fergus's emotions and characterization are grace notes around the edges of the plot, not its center. I thoroughly enjoyed this. Palmer has a light but effective touch with characterization and populates the story with interesting and distinguishable characters. The plot has a layered complexity that allows Fergus to keep making forward progress without running out of twists or getting repetitive. The motivations of the villains were not the most original, but they didn't need to be; the fun of the story is figuring out who the villains are and watching Fergus get out of impossible situations with the help of new friends. Finder was a solid first novel, but I thought Driving the Deep was a substantial improvement in both pacing and plot coherence. If I say a novel is standard science fiction, that sounds like criticism of lack of originality, but sometimes standard science fiction is exactly what I want to read. Not every book needs to do something wildly original or upend my understanding of story. I started reading science fiction because I loved tense adventures on moons of Saturn with intelligent spaceships and neat bits of technology, and they're even better with polished writing, quietly competent characterization, and an understated sense of humor. This is great stuff, and there are two more books already published that I'm now looking forward to. Highly recommended when you just want a science fiction novel. Followed by The Scavenger Door. Rating: 8 out of 10

Here are my favourite books and movies that I read and watched throughout 2024. It wasn't quite the stellar year for books as previous years: few of those books that make you want to recommend and/or buy them for all your friends. In subconscious compensation, perhaps, I reread a few classics (e.g. True Grit, Solaris), and I'm almost finished my second read of War and Peace.

Books

Elif Batuman: Either/Or (2022) Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm (1932) Michel Faber: Under The Skin (2000) Wallace Stegner: Crossing to Safety (1987) Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary (1857) Rachel Cusk: Outline (2014) Sara Gran: The Book of the Most Precious Substance (2022) Anonymous: The Railway Traveller s Handy Book (1862) Natalie Hodges: Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (2022)Gary K. Wolf: Who Censored Roger Rabbit? (1981)

Films Recent releases

• 20 Days in Mariupol (Mstyslav Chernovm, 2023)
• All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)
• Anora (Sean Baker, 2024)
• La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)
• Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023)
• Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023)
• Godland (Hlynur P lmason, 2022)
• The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Benjamin Ree, 2024)
• R.M.N. (Cristian Mungiu, 2022)
• Robot Dreams (Pablo Berger, 2023)
• The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
• Good One (India Donaldson, 2024)

Seen at a 2023 festival. Disappointments this year included Blitz (Steve McQueen), Love Lies Bleeding (Rose Glass), The Room Next Door (Pedro Almod var) and Emilia P rez (Jacques Audiard), whilst the worst new film this year was likely The Substance (Coralie Fargeat), followed by Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola), Unfrosted (Jerry Seinfeld) and Joker: Folie Deux (Todd Phillips).
Older releases ie. Films released before 2023, and not including rewatches from previous years.

• Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)
• Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
• The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986)
• Gaslight (Thorold Dickinson, 1940)
• Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
• Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
• Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986)
• Purple Noon (Ren Cl ment, 1960)
• Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
• Squid and the Whale (Noah Baumbach, 2005)
• Xala (Ousmane Semb ne, 1975)

Distinctly unenjoyable watches included The Island of Dr. Moreau (John Frankenheimer, 1996), Southland Tales (Richard Kelly, 2006), Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999) & The Hairdresser s Husband (Patrice Leconte, 19990). On the other hand, unforgettable cinema experiences this year included big-screen rewatches of Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988).

Interesting video about the hack of Andrew Tate s The Real World site [1]. Informative video about Nick Fuentes covering the racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, and how he is clearly in denial about being gay [2]. It ends with his arrest. Hopefully the first of many arrests. This is what conservatives support. Insightful article covering the history of bus-mastering attacks on computer security and ending with pwning via CF cards [3]. Interesting lecture at the seL4 symposium about attestation of a running Linux kernel [4]. I m not a fan of most attestation systems but using a separate isolated seL4 process to monitor a Linux VM offers some real benefits. Interesting seL4 symposium lecture about CPU drivers and the fact that a modern SoC is a distributed computing environment with lots of untrusted firmware [5]. I like the way he slipped and called it unworthy firmware instead of untrustworthy firmware , I think I ll copy that.

• [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j84gB2cbNps
• [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdmnHhZYOUg
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2awdgnht
• [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyTyJKugoqU
• [5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGLSJ8m-X2I

Review: Metal from Heaven, by August Clarke

Publisher:	Erewhon
Copyright:	November 2024
ISBN:	1-64566-099-0
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	443

Metal from Heaven is industrial-era secondary-world fantasy with a literary bent. It is a complete story in one book, and I would be very surprised by a sequel. Clarke previously wrote the Scapegracers young-adult trilogy, which got excellent reviews and a few award nominations, as H.A. Clarke. This is his first adult novel.

Know I adore you. Look out over the glow. The cities sundered, their machines inverted, mountains split and prairies blazing, that long foreseen Hereafter crowning fast. This calamity is a promise made to you. A prayer to you, and to your shadow which has become my second self, tucked behind my eye and growing in tandem with me, pressing outwards through the pupil, the smarter, truer, almost bursting reason for our wrath. Do not doubt me. Just look. Watch us rise as the sun comes up over the beauty. The future stains the bleakness so pink. When my violence subsides, we will have nothing, and be champions.

Marney Honeycutt is twelve years old, a factory worker, and lustertouched. She works in the Yann I. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in Ignavia City, alongside her family and her best friend, shaping the magical metal ichorite into the valuable industrial products of a new age of commerce and industry. She is the oldest of the lustertouched, the children born to factory workers and poisoned by the metal. It has made her allergic, prone to fits at any contact with ichorite, but also able to exert a strange control over the metal if she's willing to pay the price of spasms and hallucinations for hours afterwards. As Metal from Heaven opens, the workers have declared a strike. Her older sister is the spokesperson, demanding shorter hours, safer working conditions, and an investigation into the health of the lustertouched children. Chauncey's response is to send enforcer snipers to kill the workers, including the entirety of her family.

The girl sang, "Unalone toward dawn we go, toward the glory of the new morning." An enforcer shot her in the belly, and when she did not fall, her head.

Marney survives, fleeing into the city, swearing an impossible personal revenge against Yann Chauncey. An act of charity gets her a ticket on a train into the countryside. The woman who bought her ticket is a bandit who is on the train to rob it. Marney's ability to control ichorite allows her to help the bandits in return, winning her a place with the Highwayman's Choir who have been preying on the shipments of the rich and powerful and then disappearing into the hills. The Choir's secret is that the agoraphobic and paranoid Baron of the Fingerbluffs is dead and has been for years. He was killed by his staff, Hereafterist idealists, who have turned his remote territory into an anarchist commune and haven for pirates and bandits. This becomes Marney's home and the Choir becomes her family, but she never forgets her oath of revenge or the childhood friend she left behind in the piles of bodies and to whom this story is narrated. First, Clarke's writing is absolutely gorgeous.

We scaled the viny mountain jags at Montrose Barony's legal edge, the place where land was and wasn't Ignavia, Royston, and Drustland alike. There was a border but it was diffuse and hallucinatory, even more so than most. On legal papers and state maps there were harsh lines that squashed topography and sanded down the mountains into even hills in planter's rows, but here among the jutting rocks and craggy heather, the ground was lineless.

The rhythm of it, the grasp of contrast and metaphor, the word choice! That climactic word "lineless," with its echo of limitless. So good. Second, this is the rarest of books: a political fantasy that takes class and religion seriously and uses them for more than plot drivers. This is not at all our world, and the technology level is somewhat ambiguous, but the parallels to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are unmistakable. The Hereafterists that Marney joins are political anarchists, not in the sense of alternative governance structures and political theory sanitized for middle-class liberals, but in the sense of Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. The society they have built in the Fingerbluffs is temporary, threatened, and contingent, but it is sincere and wildly popular among the people who already lived there. Even beyond politics, class is a tangible force in this book. Marney is a factory worker and the child of factory workers. She barely knows how to read and doesn't magically learn over the course of the book. She has friends who are clever in the sense rewarded by politics and nobility, who navigate bureaucracies and political nuance, but that is not Marney's world. When, towards the end of the book, she has to deal with a gathering of high-class women, the contrast is stark, and she navigates that gathering only by being entirely unexpected. Perhaps the best illustration of the subtlety of this is the terminology in the book for lesbian. Marney is a crawly, which is a slur thrown at people like her (and one of the rare fictional slurs that work exactly as the author intended) but is also simply what she calls herself. Whether or not it functions as a slur depends on context, and the context is never hard to understand. The high-class lesbians she meets later are Lunarists, and react to crawly as a vile and insulting word. They use language to separate themselves from both the insult and from the social class that uses it. Language is an indication of culture and manners and therefore of morality, unlike deeds, which admit endless justifications.

Conversation was fleeting. Perdita managed with whomever stood near her, chipper about every prettiness she saw, the flitting butterflies, the dappled light between the leaves, the lushness and the fragrance of untamed land, and her walking companions took turns sharing in her delight. It was infectious, how happy she was. She was going to slaughter millions. She was going to skip like this all the while.

The handling of religion is perhaps even better. Marney was raised a Tullian, which sits alongside two other fleshed-out fictional religions and sketches of several more. Tullians tend to be conservative and patriarchal, and Marney has a realistically complicated relationship with faith: sticking with some Tullian worship practices and gestures because they're part of who she is, feeling a kinship to other Tullians, discarding beliefs that don't fit her, and revising others. Every major religion has a Hereafterist spin or reinterpretation that upends or reverses the parts of the religion that were used to prop up the existing social order and brings it more in line with Hereafterist ideals. We see the Tullian Hereafterist variation in detail, and as someone who has studied a lot of methods of reinterpreting Christianity, I was impressed by how well Clarke invents both a belief system and its revisionist rewrite. This is exactly how religions work in human history, but one almost never sees this subtlety in fantasy novels. Marney's allergy to ichorite causes her internal dialogue to dissolve into hallucinatory synesthesia when she's manipulating or exposed to it. Since that's most of the book, substantial portions read like drug trips with growing body horror. I normally hate this type of narration, so it's a sign of just how good Clarke's writing is that I tolerated it and even enjoyed parts. It helps that the descriptions are irreverent and often surprising, full of unexpected metaphors and sudden turns. It's very hard not to quote paragraph after paragraph of this book. Clarke is also doing a lot with gender that I don't feel qualified to comment in detail on, but it would not surprise me to see this book in the Otherwise Award recommendation list. I can think of three significant male characters, all of whom are well-done, but every other major character is female by at least some gender definition. Within that group, though, is huge gender diversity of the complicated and personal type that doesn't force people into defined boxes. Marney's sexuality is similarly unclassified and sometimes surprising. My one complaint is that I thought the sex scenes (which, to warn, are often graphic) fell into the literary fiction trap of being described so closely and physically that it didn't feel like anyone involved was actually enjoying themselves. (This is almost certainly a matter of personal taste.) I had absolutely no idea how Clarke was going to end this book, and the last couple of chapters caught me by surprise. I'm still not sure what I think about the climax. It's not the ending that I wanted, but one of the merits of this book is that it never did what I thought I wanted and yet made me enjoy the journey anyway. It is, at least, a genre ending, not a literary ending: The reader gets a full explanation of what is going on, and the setting is not static the way that it so often is in literary fiction. The characters can change the world, for good or for ill. The story felt frustrating and incomplete when I first finished it, but I haven't stopped thinking about this book and I think I like the shape of it a bit more now. It was certainly unexpected, at least by me. Clarke names Dhalgren as one of their influences in the acknowledgments, and yes, Metal from Heaven is that kind of book. This is the first 2024 novel I've read that felt like the kind of book that should be on award shortlists. I'm not sure it was entirely successful, and there are parts of it that I didn't like or that weren't for me, but it's trying to do something different and challenging and uncomfortable, and I think it mostly worked. And the writing is so good.

She looked like a mythic princess from the old woodcuts, who ruled nature by force of goodness and faith and had no legal power.

Metal from Heaven is not going to be everyone's taste. If you do not like literary fantasy, there is a real chance that you will hate this. I am very glad that I read it, and also am going to take a significant break from difficult books before I tackle another one. But then I'm probably going to try the Scapegracers series, because Clarke is an author I want to follow. Content notes: Explicit sex, including sadomasochistic sex. Political violence, mostly by authorities. Murdered children, some body horror, and a lot of serious injuries and death. Rating: 8 out of 10

Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds, by Melissa Caruso

Series:	The Echo Archives #1
Publisher:	Orbit
Copyright:	November 2024
ISBN:	0-316-30364-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	388

The Last Hour Between Worlds is urban, somewhat political high fantasy with strong fae vibes. It is the first book of a series, but it stands alone quite well. Kembral Thorne is a Hound, a member of the guild that serves as guards, investigators, and protectors. Kembral's specialty is Echo retrieval: rescues of people and animals who have fallen through a weak spot in reality into one of the strange, dangerous, and malleable layers called Echoes. Kem once rescued a dog from six layers down, an almost unheard-of feat. Kem is also a new single mother, which means her past two months have been spent in a sleep-deprived haze revolving exclusively around her much-beloved infant. Dona Marjorie Swift's year-turning party is the first time she's been out without Emmi since she gave birth, and she's only there because her sister took the child and practically shoved her out the door. Now, she's desperately trying to remember how to be social and normal, which is not made easier by the unexpected presence of Rika at the party. Rika Nonesuch is not a Hound. She's a Cat, a member of the guild of thieves and occasional assassins. They are the nemesis of the Hounds, but in a stylized and formalized way in which certain courtesies are expected. (The politics of this don't really make sense; you just have to go with it.) Kem has complicated feelings about Rika's grace, banter, and intoxicating perfume, feelings that she thought might be reciprocated until Rika drugged her during an apparent date and left her buried under a pile of garbage. She was not expecting Rika to be at this party and is definitely not ready to have a conversation with her. This emotional turmoil is rudely interrupted by the death of nearly everyone at the party via an Echo poison, the appearance of a dark figure driving a black sword into someone, and the descent of the entire party into an Echo. This was one of those books that kept getting better the farther into the book I read. I was a bit leery at first because the publisher's blurb made it sound more like horror than I prefer, but this is more the disturbing strangeness of fae creatures than the sort of gruesomeness, disgust, or body horror that I find off-putting. Most importantly, the point of this book is not to torture the characters or scare the reader. It's instead structured a bit like a murder mystery, but one whose resolution requires working out obscure fantasy rules and hidden political agendas. One of the currencies in the world of Echos is blood, but another is emotion, revelation, and the stories that bring both, and Caruso focuses the story more on that aspect than on horrifying imagery.

Rika frowned. "Resolve it? How?" "I have no idea." I couldn't keep my frustration from leaking through. "Might be that we have to delve deep into our own hearts to confront the unhealed wounds we've carried with us in secret. Might be that we have to say their names backward, or just close our eyes and they'll go away. Echoes never make any damned sense." Rika made a face. "We'd better not have to confront our unhealed wounds, or I'm leaving you to die."

All of The Last Hour Between Worlds is told in the first person from Kem's perspective, but Rika is the best character in this book. Kem is a rather straightforward, dogged, stubborn protector; Rika is complicated, selfish, conflicted, and considerably more dynamic. The first obvious twist in her background I spotted so long before Kem found out that it was a bit frustrating, but there were multiple satisfying twists after that. As advertised in the blurb, there's a sapphic romance angle here, but it's the sort that comes from a complicated friendship and a lot of mutual respect rather than love at first sight. Some of their relationship conflict is driven by misunderstanding, but the misunderstanding happens before the novel begins, which means the reader doesn't have to sit through the bit where one yells at the characters for being stupid. It helps that the characters have something concrete to do, and that driving plot problem is multi-layered and satisfying. Each time the party falls through a layer of reality, it's mostly reset to the start of the book, but the word "mostly" is hiding a lot of subtlety. Given the clock at the start of each chapter and the blurb (if one read it), the reader can make a good guess that the plot problem will not be fully resolved until the characters fall quite deep into the Echoes, but the story never felt repetitive the way that some time loop stories can. As the characters gain more understanding, the problems change, the players change, and they have to make several excursions into the surrounding world. This is the sort of fantasy that feels a bit like science fiction. You're thrown into a world with a different culture and different rules that are foreign to the reader and natural to the characters. Part of the fun of reading is figuring out the rules, history, and backstory while watching the characters try to solve the puzzles they're faced with. The writing is good but not great. Characterization was good enough for a story primarily focused on action and puzzle-solving, but it was a bit lacking in subtlety. I think Caruso's strengths showed most in the world design, particularly the magic system and the rules followed by the Echo creatures. The excursions outside of the somewhat-protected house struck a balance between eeriness and comprehensibility that reminded me of T. Kingfisher or Sandman. The human politics were unfortunately less successful and rested on some tired centrist cliches. Thankfully, this was not the main point of the story. I should also warn that there is a lot of talk about babies. Kem's entire identity at the start of the novel, to the point of incessant monologue, is "new mother." This is not a perspective we get very often in fantasy, and Kem eventually finds a steadier balance between her bond with her daughter and the other parts of her life. I think some readers will feel very seen. But Caruso leans hard into maternal bonding. So hard. If you don't want to read about someone who is deliriously obsessed with their new child, you may want to skip this one. Right after I finished this book, I thought it was amazing. Now that I've had a few days to think about it, the lack of subtlety and the facile human politics brought it down a notch. I'm a science fiction reader at heart, so I loved the slow revelation of mechanics; the reader starts the story by knowing that Kem can "blink step" but not knowing what that means, and by the end of the story one not only knows but has opinions about its limitations, political implications, and interactions with other forms of magic. The Echo worlds are treated similarly, and this type of world-building is my jam. But the cost is that the human characters, particularly the supporting cast, don't get the same focus and therefore are a bit straightforward and obvious. The subplot with Dona Vandelle was particularly annoying. Ah well. Kem and Rika's relationship did work, and it's the center of the book. If you like fantasy mechanics but are a bit leery of fae stories because they feel too symbolic or arbitrary, give this a try. It's the most satisfyingly constructed fae story that I've read in a long time. It's not great literary fiction, but it's also not trying to be; it's a puzzle adventure, and a well-executed one. Recommended, and I will definitely be reading the sequel. Content notes: Lots of violent death and other physical damage, creepy dream worlds with implied but not explicit horror, and rather a lot of blood. Followed by The Last Soul Among Wolves, not yet published at the time I wrote this review. Rating: 8 out of 10